constant humiliation. It was very faint, the trace of negro blood which
flowed in their veins, so faint that it was necessary to be told of it,
but it was sufficient to render a stay in America so much the more
intolerable to both, as they had inherited all the pride of their name,
a name which the Emperor mentioned at St. Helena as that of one of his
bravest officers. Florent's grandfather was no other, indeed, than the
Colonel Chapron who, as Napoleon desired information, swam the Dnieper on
horseback, followed a Cossack on the opposite shore, hunted him like a
stag, laid him across his saddle and took him back to the French camp.
When the Empire fell, that hero, who had compromised himself in an
irreparable manner in the army of the Loire, left his country and,
accompanied by a handful of his old comrades, went to found in the
southern part of the United States, in Alabama, a sort of agricultural
colony, to which they gave the name--which it still preserves--of Arcola,
a naive and melancholy tribute to the fabulous epoch which, however, had
been dear to them.

Who would have recognized the brilliant colonel, who penetrated by the
side of Montbrun the heart of the Grande Redoute, in the planter of
forty-five, busy with his cotton and his sugar-cane, who made a fortune
in a short time by dint of energy and good sense? His success, told of
in France, was the indirect cause of another emigration to Texas, led by
General Lallemand, and which terminated so disastrously. Colonel Chapron
had not, as can be believed, acquired in roaming through Europe very
scrupulous notions an the relations of the two sexes. Having made the
mother of his child a pretty and sweet-tempered mulattress whom he met on
a short trip to New Orleans, and whom he brought back to Arcola, he
became deeply attached to the charming creature and to his son, so much
the more so as, with a simple difference of complexion and of hair, the
child was the image of him. Indeed, the old warrior, who had no